Skipping directories *containing* hidden folders?

Hi,

I am evaluating ABR11 (11.0.17311). I have an internal Raid 0 "volume" for data which contains 1,500 GB of data, in 20,000 files across 2,300 folders.

For several days I have been running both Disk & File GFS backups for this volume to a vault defined on an external NAS device.

For the File backup I selected the Root directory and everything beneath it, for the Disk backup I selected the Disk.

Yesterday I realized that one my folders was not being included in either backup. This is a folder named "Recorded TV" which is used by Windows Media Center 7. It contains 752GB in 168 .wtv files. It also contains a hidden folder named "TempRec" used by WMC internally.

I ran test "Full" File backups selecting only the Recorded TV folder with all meaningful permutations of the following settings:

1) selecting the directory vs the individual files/sub folders,
2) "Hidden" exlcusion on/off,
3) "System Files" exclusion on/off,
4) TempRec folder "Hidden" attribute on/off,
5) TempRec folder (and other file's) "Archive" attrbute on/off.

The bottom line is that, regardless of anything else, if TempRec is selected for backup then the *entire* parent folder "Recorded TV" and *everything* in it is ignored/skipped by ABR11.

Again, this is true regardless of ANY combination of the above settings including TempRec's Hidden attribute and the Hidden File exclusion.

Question 1: A bug this bad wouldn't exist in a mature program so what am I missing? Is this related to WMC specifically or is it more general?

Question 2: Are there any summary data/reports? Nowhere can I find any summary information about what a backup or archive contains such as:

A) Amount of data (total bytes),
B) Number of folders,
C) Number of files (with and without consideration of multiple versions),
D) Number of excluded files by exclusion type,
E) Etc.?

This information is key to your developer's core testing. You wouldn't choose to hide something so fundamentally valuable from the user so how to I find it?

Question 3: How do I verify the completeness of a backup? All the Validation Job tells me is that it, the Validation Job, succeeded.

There's obviously a lot I don't know about ABR. Thanks for reading and considering all this...